Elif Kendir-Beraha

Dr., Architecture, Istanbul Bilgi University

Elif Kendir-Beraha is an architect and academic at Istanbul Bilgi University, Faculty of Architecture. Her PhD research, which focused on traditional Anatolian stonemasonry as a case study displaying the impact of making and craft knowledge on architectural conception, was completed at RMIT University. She has a MScAAD from Columbia University, and a BArch and MArch from Middle East Technical University. Her main areas of interest are political ecology of urban environments, craft culture, architectural phenomenology, and the epistemological impact of sites on building praxis. She has exhibited her research nationally and internationally, the most recent being Harran: Physiognomy of a Plain at Studio-X Istanbul in 2019 with FOL Collective, an occasionally productive art-design research collaboration with Ceren Balkır Övünç. In Fall 2020–2021, she conducted a graduate research studio focusing on the political ecology of the city of Istanbul titled Rewilding the Metropolis with Zeynep Turan Hoffman, and organized a seminar series titled Wild Talks in parallel to the research studio.